Category: LETTERS Page 2 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
Brookline, Massachusetts. April 19, 1900.

Dear Strong

I am delighted beyond measure that my little book should please you. Thank you very much for all you say. It encourages me very much, coming from a person of your solid judgment and religious nature and education. If you find my book good, it can’t be rotten. But I must attempt to answer your criticism, so as to set myself right both with you and with my own conscience. When I said that religion should give up its pretension to be dealing with matters of fact, I meant, as you doubtless felt yourself, that the religious machinery (gods, hell, heaven, grace, sacraments etc) was not in the plane of fact but in the plane of symbols. But symbols are symbols of fact; and in a sense poetry deals with matters of fact, and the better and more poetical the poetry the more real and fundamental the facts with which it deals. It is not artificial in the sense of being arbitrary. It is a representation of reality, according to the requirements of a part of reality, the human imagination. And yet there is a plain sense in which it is right and obvious to say that poetry does not deal with (I should have said, perhaps, does not contain, does not constitute) matters of fact. Apollo is not a fact in the same plane as the sun: yet the religion of Apollo “deals with” the fact “sun”. Otherwise the religion of Apollo would be impossible; it would have no basis and no subject-matter. So that all I mean by relegating religion to the sphere of poetry is to distinguish, as we should all do in poetry, between the reality represented and the fiction by which that representation is made. Painting does not deal with flesh and hair, but with pigments; yet by its manipulation of those pigments it represents, and, if you like, deals with, hair and flesh. Possibly the whole ambiguity might be removed by saying deals in, instead of deals with. But my book was not meant to be a creed, even for skeptics, and its definitions are not meant to have theological precision. They are “thrown at” ideas.

. . . You can’t sum up the moral values of the parts of the Universe and say the result is the moral value of the Universe itself. For these moral values cancel one another and disappear into merely physical energies when you trace them back to their source. The good and evil in the world are not the world’s merits and demerits, because by the time you have traced them back to the general laws from which good and evil alike flow, the laws have forfeited those moral characteristics. I disagree, then, with what you say about the credit for what is fair and good being due rather to the Universe than to us. It is as if you said vision belonged rather to the Universe than to the animals in it, because of course the Universe gave the animals eyes, and not they to themselves. The Universe deserves no credit for our virtues until it acquires them—until it becomes ourselves. When the sympathy with moral ends begins to be a principle of action, moral values arise; there are none in the mere conditions of goodness, and the rain and the corn and sunshine are not moral objects. To regard them as such is really to make them gods; it is mythology; and to my mind your awe- inspiring, amiable, sympathetic and admonishing Universe is a mythological object. I value it as such; as such it is a religious idea, and a true one; but it is not a matter of fact.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
University Club
Madison, Wisconsin. April 18, 1910

Dear Susie,

This place is, as you supposed, very much like a small Boston. The only peculiarity of it is that it is situated between three small lakes, and built on several hills, so that it is picturesque at a distance, although the houses are of the usually American wooden, nondescript kind. The university has some good buildings, and lawns, but is of course only half-finished, and full of architectural incongruities—one building brick and Gothic, the next stone and classical, the next a wooden shed, or a concrete store-house. The professors are very presentable, their wives more provincial than themselves, for they marry too young, and then, by their studies and contact with the world, outgrow the class they belonged to in their youth, and to which their wives belong. The students seem to be good fellows, not essentially different from those at Harvard, except that the extremes of fashion and poverty are wanting here. My lectures are not such a success as they were in New York, because my ultra-modern, “superior-person” point of view, is not familiar here, as it is in that very cosmopolitan and ventilated place—New York. However, some of the professors who come to hear me are very appreciative. Tomorrow, I am going to meet a class of advanced students who have been studying one of my books! It makes me feel strangely famous—although the sales of my books rather indicate that nobody reads them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville, VA.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. April 17, 1952

Bertrand Russell has said to Cory that he (Russell) had no objection to what I say about his brother in “The Middle Span”; but in the third part . . . there is much more, also about himself and his philosophy, that he may not like. I should regret to seem ungrateful to two brothers to whom I owe so much.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To William Lyon Phelps
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. April 16, 1939

Why did Barrett Wendell talk like that? It was not an attempt to be English. He was not an Anglo maniac, as he himself said quite truly. Nobody in England then talked like that. How, then, did he fall into that strange habit? Now, I knew him only slightly, and have to make a hypothesis, but I should explain the matter to myself in this way. Wendell loved New England, but the N.E. before the Revolution. He would have wished to be a Cavalier, all courage and elegance. His speech was a failure as a mark of elegance but it was a success as a proof of courage. Anyhow, it was a profound constant protest against being like other people. He felt he belonged to the London of Beau Brummel; and even in my day there lingered in Boston a faint echo of those days, again not in their elegance but in their mannishness. “Rum and deco-rum!” he exclaimed once in an after-dinner speech: that was all we needed in this world. A horrible pun, but an interesting mixture of recklessness and propriety as an ideal of character. Then, saturated with this pathos of distance, and being warm hearted and affectionate, he was intensely sentimental, yet heroically kept his sentimentality in check, and put up with things as they were. That was his martyrdom. And he married Mrs. Wendell.

. . . I, at the very most, might have said that I was what people would call an atheist or a pessimist. In reality I have never been either. Early Christians were called atheists and Buddhists are called pessimists: that only means that they reject the kind of God or the kind of happiness that the critic is accustomed to conceive. But I believe in the reality of Truth, the denial of which by Nietzsche, James, Dewey and a lot of Evangelicals and Idealists is, according to Lutoslawski, genuine atheism. And I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism. But this play of dialectic with concepts may seem to you forced. God and happiness seem to you proper names for distinct facts. God either exists or He doesn’t exist. A man is either happy or unhappy. But can you seriously maintain that? The idea of God has infinite shades: even in the Hebrew tradition it is most ambiguous as an idea. It is only as a verbal idol, as a formula in a ritual, that the object is distinct. Would the God of Aristotle be God? Would the God of Royce be God, although avowedly not a power? And how about Brahma, or the God of Spinoza? These things are not so simple, if you stop to think a little.

. . . I heartily agree that old age is, or may be as in my case, far happier than youth. Even physically pleasanter. I was never more entertained and less troubled than I am now.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 15, 1945

Two robust sergeants, send by Freidenberg, who tomorrow becomes a Warrant Officer, have just brought me your letter of April 4, with the enclosed order for the remainder of the “escrow” in the Bank. I hope it will be enough to pay for your holidays in Maine. I have written to Mr. Wheelock, saying that I wish all my royalties to be paid to you for the present, since international banking seems to be impossible, and is likely to remain difficult for some time. My own account with Brown Shipley & Co has been “transferred to the Custodian of enemy property,” according to an inscription in red across an old cheque in favour of Miss Tindall, which she has returned. She is now willing to receive lire, so that I shall clear all indebtedness to her as soon as she returns Part II of the Idea of Christ, which she is now copying.

Your father’s sentiments about English speech prove the relativity of morals and aesthetics. He might object to an English accent in you, if it were noticeable, but in Mrs. Cory he ought to regard it as an interesting and agreeable natural fact, like bird-notes. And in this case they are so much lighter and sweeter!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.